When valuing a closely held business, I frequently pose the following questions to the business owner regarding him/her and key employees: (1) What do you think the business is worth without you? When a business is sold, the selling owner does not go along with the deal. The seller might agree to work for the new owners for a limited… Read More
Note: Thomas Deans is the author of Every Family’s Business which the NY Times has listed as one of the ten books every business owner should read. Tom has been an owner of a very successful family business and currently spends much of his time speaking in the U.S. and Canada to groups of business owners. Tom is speaking at… Read More
Businesses with a sole owner range from the local pizzeria to multi-billion dollar enterprises. What will happen to the business in the event of the premature death or disability of the owner? In the case of very small businesses which are wholly dependent on the efforts of the owner, the answer is the business will close. In the case of… Read More
Financing guaranteed by the Small Business Administration is widely misunderstood – and thereby underutilized – by business owners. In 2016 the SBA 7(a) program was authorized for $26.5 billion but only $24.5 billion was actually deployed. The definition of “Small Business” for these purposes includes companies with as many as 1,000 employees in many industries. We will focus here on… Read More
Many business owners who want to sell their businesses have not engaged in tax planning prior to the sale. We will briefly discuss both sales to third-parties and sales to insiders – i.e. key employees or family members. Sales to Third-Parties There are two basic forms of the transaction – a sale of the stock or a sale of the… Read More
*( Less than 50 employees and less than $5M in sales) Owners are caught up in day-to-day business planning and unless there is a crisis spend their time focusing on new sales, customer relations, and managing operations. Sometimes, the first business “crisis” these owners face is when they contemplate life after business. Then a flood of questions arises – How can I… Read More
Sellers, in preparing their businesses for sale, want to make the business as attractive as possible to a buyer. Change of ownership is a particularly critical moment for the business and a buyer will be particularly sensitive to the possibility of losing key employees during the transition period. For a buyer, this will be a large perceived risk. Additional risk… Read More
I must confess that I am a bit of a procrastinator when it comes to writing my monthly feature articles for Business2Business Magazines. It appears that I am not the only one with this characteristic. My clients think about leaving their businesses all the time, but procrastinate about actually doing something to prepare for that exit. My clients are hard-working,… Read More
Business owners often have a sense of gratitude towards their employees – they understand that they couldn’t have built their business without those employees and want to see them have the opportunity to run the business and enjoy the fruits of ownership. Over 50% of my clients express an initial desire to sell to employees if the key employee group… Read More
Every once in a while, the IRS attempts to achieve large results without the benefit of legislation. Such a time is now, and the IRS has in its sights family business transfers. By far the greatest source of wealth in this country is business ownership. Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Warren Buffet, Ross Perot, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, and Mark Zuckerberg… Read More
